As you go to the next phase, water turns from a survival pressure into a resource, and you're using it in crafting and making vehicles and making higher-tier materials, similarly to Spice. Spice, at the beginning, starts as just this thing that makes you do really cool abilities and become prescient and see the future. But, as you go into the mid-game, again, it becomes a crafting resource. Then, at the endgame, it becomes like a currency that you're using to spend and get political favors and influence the Landsraad . So, that's one way the game chan

Doing so not only gets you access to plenty of additional resources for your journey but also can cut down on traversal time. Many rock formations have caves that you can enter, allowing you to run through the entire structure and stay in the shade. This is a fantastic boon when you're about to die of sunstroke.

Thankfully, Dune Awakening DLC Awakening doesn’t make the mistake of asking you to fill your inventory with resources for hours at a time without doing anything else, instead ensuring each resource you collect is instantly used for something that helps you progress. However, there’s still a repetitiveness to general tasks that can’t be igno

At a high level, Dune: Awakening has some very lofty goals. It is a shared open-world survival game , so players can encounter, work with, and compete with others. The game takes players through four stages that Funcom internally refers to as Survive, Protect, Expand, and Control. This is not necessarily hard-defined elements in the game but a description in which the gameplay evolves. Players arrive on the iconic planet of Arrakis, also known as Dune, as a prisoner and must survive its endless sands, beginning the Survive "phase." Here, water is a survival demand and Spice is a rarity; by the Control "phase," players should be able to wield both as resources of political influence in endgame content, player trades, and so fo

A: When we start a product or a game, we want to find out how we can succeed: right when you start making a game. Where we thought we could succeed was by adding a narrative element to a survival game and borrowing from what some MMORPGs are doing, what some single-player games are doing, and having a strong player journey that they're going thro

Thankfully, Awakening’s Arrakis itself is great fun to explore. Not because of any unique visual choices - it’s a lot of rocks and sand dunes as you’d expect - but because of what you need to think about as you go from waypoint to waypo

A: No, not really. I mean, we will want to. I just saw it for the first time in December with everybody else - we didn't get early access - and our launch scope had already been set far, far before we watched it. We will look at it and see if there are any post-launch things that we can do and take inspiration from, whether it's from their take on the early sisterhood, the early Bene Gesserit , or any outfits they have, maybe. It's really far in the past, like 10,000 years, so we can't bring in any characters necessarily but we can take some inspiration. But nothing in the launch product of the g

I think the replayability potential we're seeing with Dune: Awakening is off the charts, and I'm excited to see what kind of hybrid characters the community comes up with! Share your builds in the comments and stay tuned for more coverage on Dune: Awaken

While, technically speaking, you can just bulldoze your way through to your final destination, it's a good idea to hit up many different places along the way to make the most of your journey. Just keep an eye on your water supply as you do, making sure you have a backup plan in place.

There are other non-combat mechanics introduced here as well, like Pentashield Barriers of a particular color, which can only be passed through if players manage to find a nearby Wristband Key of a matching color. This certainly has some puzzle potential to it, and there were a few times during our preview that we encountered situations like that, but it seemed to lean more on the gimmicky side of things this early in the game. There are some areas in Dune: Awakening that feel like mazes due to Pentashield Barriers, requiring players to take certain routes before they can take others, so there's potential there for the system to get even more interesting later on in the g

It's just balancing this stuff in that way. Even though it's used in different ways, it's always valuable, and it's always scarce for the quantities that you need at that time. It is a hard thing to balance, and players will use whatever mechanics we give them - exploiting or coming up with smart ways to use systems. It's something we'll have to be very diligent about balancing once it's live. It's a persistent world , so what enters the game stays there fore

Since Dune Awakening will become much more than a multiplayer survival game after you’ve spent dozens of hours with it, it’s hard to judge the experience after I’ve only just scratched the surface. As someone who often finds survival games dull and daunting, I’m glad Funcom has strived to make every venture into the wilderness intense yet rewarding.. I just hope that continues as you progress and slowly but surely follow in the footsteps of Lisan al-G